This month has been quite interesting so far, there has been a lot of "recoil" as I call it from the results of our 2nd place victory at NYC Music Hack day. Recoil can be misinterpreted, it has definitely been a series of good repercussions! We have had many groups of people and educators have expressed their interest in our efforts with Scratch and the MaKey MaKey.
Since the event itself, Graham, Dr. Ruthmann and myself have been working towards refining the Musical Construction Kit. We have four working prototypes so far, all of which will soon be on display over at the Construction Kit blog. That is the place to go from now on for more detailed information on the components of the Kit, coupled with high-res pictures and HD video taken along the way!
Alternatively, to make use of our available resources at the NYC Dev Shop, we have a spawning idea for a web app. Graham and I were listening to a few mixes of electronic music. Some of the song transitions were really painful to listen to since the tempos and, more importantly the key changes, were not complementary. So an Idea popped into my head, there should be a service that allows the user to load up two songs and that will give feedback as to whether the two songs will sound nice when mixed together!
The current title idea is smArt DJ, a rather fun play on words in my opinion :). The web app would seem to be relatively easy to construct as of now. I think the best solution would be to gather audio and information through the Echo Nest API. This services can fetch basically all the musically pertinent information from their database of about 50 million songs. Based on the information pulled from the Echo Nest, code can be written to show the used whether or not the songs will be compatible to mash together. Maybe it would look something like this...
I think this could be a really neat way for anyone to learn about successful song mixing as well as basic harmonic progression!
